Walkabout

Endless Flight;
2007

Find it at:

In the perpetually outmoded world of club comps, there are two ways to ensure fame and fortune: Sign up to some chain series (DJ-Kicks, Global Underground) or keep your transitions so ironic, jagged, and counterintuitive that critics can't help but note your "wild eclecticism" and "vibrant juxtapositions" and laud you for your ability to mash-up Mancini, Martin Denny, Artery, and Icelandic dub in two minutes or something. In the age of James Murphy and Girl Talk, even the most trifling mid-album house track better have some Krautrock or Lee Perry allusions if it's going to catch anyone's attention. I don't mean to sound overly critical, since this is hardly a new occurrence. Juan Atkins and Derrick May were spraying Funkadelic all over "Radio-Activity" back in 1986 and Larry Levan laced Jamaican dub with powdery disco at a time when both genres barely even existed. But my contention here is merely that the most prominent DJs and splicers are increasingly satisfied to sacrifice any sustained sense of mood for the sort of obligatory thrills of, say, binding Blondie to Nurse With Wound. Which is precisely how Optimo ended their most famous album, the terrifically silly How to Kill the DJ, Part II.

Optimo is JD Twitch and JG Wilkes, two peerless DJs at Glasgow's Sub Club who have spent the past decade mixing the most fashionable concoctions of post-punk, techno, and funk into everlasting bouts of grinding pop psychosis. Their names became household with 2004's double-disc Kill the DJ II, which gnashed through the most guttural beats of everything from Laibach to Carl Craig. It was arguably the best mix album of that year, but it spent half its time crawling out from the trenches it kept digging itself into. In the eternal battle between novelty and momentum, Kill the DJ II tended to side with the former. After this epic anthology of drooling hipster name-dropping, 2005's Psyche Out was a genuinely enjoyable jolt of dance purity that managed to segue in a couple prog songs without losing any velocity. Walkabout completes that trend. It's uncompromising and unadulterated and consists entirely of pure synthetic electricity. There's still a tremendous amount of diversity here-- hell, the title cut's from Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats-- but it's all in the service of the same pulsing circuits of rhythm that act as Optimo's neo-acid foundation.

Beyond the sheer consistency, the new album seems even more deeply affiliated with Eno, the Detroit scene, and Basic Channel. It may as well be a European Union symposium on house, from the most moronic Glastonbury tent to the dankest Cologne dub basement. It courses through British industrialism, German minimalism, Scandinavian sound sculpture, and Dutch slapstick without ever missing a mark. With the exception of Boris' benzo-blasted psych-coma ("My Machine" off Pink), Walkabout unloads glowing synth circuitry and metallic meltdowns like an hour-and-a-half evacuation's going on at the club. Throbbing Gristle's cloying twitters are swallowed whole by Grungerman's industrial grab-bag of warehouse rave: factory alarms, stomping feet, chiming glass, and the faint hum of house music from a distant building. Pan Sonic fumbles around, enveloped by burnished electronics and trodden by some delightfully tacky Latin settings off a Casio. Who cares whether Databrain's "Electrofrogs" exhibits the slightest trace of originality? It's impossible to impugn heaps of handclaps and hi-hats piled under hulking resonators.

Undeniably, the most impressive portion is the middle, where Philus spins cell-phone tones into gorged pop and Shane Berry alchemically converts spitting into doo-wop amidst razor-carved reels. Even the least memorable track here, Godsy's ambient "The Grass Runs Red", is covered in the ecstatic noise of dribbled static and foam. And, as a testament to the producers' prowess, one should note that the best moments are in the transitions, not in the songs themselves. Witness the tipping point between Lenny Dee & Nicolai Vorkapich's "The Virus" and Philus' "Kuvio 3". It's like an Apollo mission heard through a rusty screen door, or like a laserium with construction defects. The sheer depth and volume of the tracks are immediately perceptible to even the laziest listener.

Lest I appear overzealous, it would only be fair to note that Walkabout isn't inventing the wheel here. There's nothing distinctive enough to leave indelible imprints upon the history of dance mixes, and there isn't anything so spellbindingly creative it demolishes the very scaffolds of electronic music. While I'm glad Optimo have loosened the mash-up mentality's grip on their otherwise accomplished albums, they've yet to release anything propulsive enough to leave listeners in a permanent state of withered euphoria. Better to say Optimo have come one step closer to perfecting their deadly stockpile of broiling rave and retro homage.